Month: August 2011

joebowman.scienceblog.com – Like clockwork, new devices and technology come along to enhance and enrich our lives. Smart phones and tablets are the laptops and PDA’s of our Age. Small, usually pocket sized gadgets are more powerful now than ever before. I was leaving a restaurant recently and I noticed a young family at a table … Read moreYour Smart Device is Making You Weird: Family Norms

By Joe Bowman | joebowman.scienceblog.com In the dry and parched lands of the Americas the cactus in all it’s many forms thrive in the some of the most challenging environments. In ecosystems where even the slightest advantage can mean the difference between survival and extinction each adaptation brings new opportunities for gaining advantages. The most … Read moreA Very Brief Overview of Cactus Spines

Long before humans started injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal, the level of atmospheric CO2 rose significantly as the Earth came out of its last ice age. Many scientists have long suspected that the source of that carbon was from the deep sea. But researchers haven’t […]

Polyploidal cancer cells—cells that have more than two copies of each chromosome—are much larger than most other cancer cells, are resistant to chemotherapy and radiation treatments and are associated with disease relapse. A new study by Brown University researchers is the first to reveal key physical properties of these “giant” cancer cells. The research, published […]

A team of scientists has uncovered new molecular properties of water—a discovery of a phenomenon that had previously gone unnoticed. Liquid water is known to be an excellent transporter of its own autoionization products; that is, the charged species obtained when a water molecule (H2O) is split into protons (H+) and hydroxide ions (OH−). This […]

Neutron stars are the smallest, densest stars in the universe, born out of the gravitational collapse of extremely massive stars. True to their name, neutron stars are composed almost entirely of neutrons — neutral subatomic particles that have been compressed into a small, incredibly dense celestial package. A new study in Nature, co-led by MIT […]

MIT researchers have developed novel photography optics that capture images based on the timing of reflecting light inside the optics, instead of the traditional approach that relies on the arrangement of optical components. These new principles, the researchers say, open doors to new capabilities for time- or depth-sensitive cameras, which are not possible with conventional […]

It turns out, female cheetahs are quite picky about their mates. And when they’re allowed to choose them, the chances of healthy offspring improve. A former graduate student at Southern Illinois University Carbondale recently published a study that explains at least one factor female cheetahs use to make those choices. The findings may lead to […]

Baylor College of Medicine is collaborating with VistaGen Therapeutics, Inc. on a study of the anti-suicidal effects of a new VistaGen drug candidate in healthy veteran volunteers. “The suicide rate is two times higher in veterans than in age- and sex-matched civilians,” said Dr. Marijn Lijffijt, assistant professor in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and […]

ICHEP 2018 participants. (Image: ICHEP 2018) It’s that time of the year when physicists from around the world gather at the “biggie” of conferences in high-energy physics — the biennial International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP). This year’s event, the 39th in the series, is taking place in Seoul, South Korea, on 4–11 July. Here’s a taste […]

The CERN Linear Electron Accelerator for Research (CLEAR) is a user facility for accelerator R&D (Image: Julien Ordan/CERN) The summer issue of Accelerating News is now online. In this issue you can read about: recent milestones passed by the HL-LHC collaboration, namely the construction of the first 11T dipole model prototype and the world's first crabbing of a […]

Five days hands-on Geant4 course organised by the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare and the University of Trento will be held in Trento (Italy) from 26 to 30 November 2018. Geant4 is a software toolkit, written in C++, for simulating tracking of particles in the matter with the Monte Carlo approach. The software is developed and maintained by […]

Ana Lopes LHCP participants in the San Domenico's Centre. (Image: R Serra/FotoBouque) Some 450 researchers from around the world headed to historic Bologna, Italy, on 4–9 June to attend the sixth Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP) conference. The many talks demonstrated the breadth of the LHC physics programme, as the collider’s experiments dig deep into the […]

Ana Lopes Samuel Ting presenting the latest results from AMS in CERN’s main auditorium. (Image: Julien Ordan/CERN) “None of the AMS results were predicted”, said Samuel Ting when he presented the latest results from the space-based magnetic spectrometer last week to a packed main auditorium. The results include flux measurements of secondary cosmic rays and […]

XENON1T is housed in the underground hall of LNGS in Italy. The cryostat is located inside the large water tank (left) next to a three-story building containing auxiliary systems. (Image credit: Roberto Corrieri and Patrick De Perio.) XENON1T is the world’s largest and most sensitive detector for direct searches of dark matter in the form […]

A xenon–xenon collision recorded by the CMS detector. (Image: CMS/CERN) Some 900 nuclear physicists from all over the world are meeting this week in Venice, Italy, for Quark Matter 2018, the 27th International Conference on Ultrarelativistic Nucleus–Nucleus Collisions. The focus of the conference is the hot quark–gluon plasma (QGP) that is thought to have prevailed […]

In this issue you can read a report from the "Accelerator - Industry Co-Innovation" workshop identifying opportunities and research challenges for next-generation accelerators, learn about the Tactile Collider, a novel educational tool making accelerator science accessible for visually impaired (VI) school children; and find out more about why training (anti)matters, from the young researchers who joined a two-day […]

Nick Ellis (On behalf of the International Organising Committee) The fourth Asia-Europe-Pacific School of High-Energy Physics, AEPSHEP2018 (2018.aepshep.org), to be held in Quy Nhon, Vietnam, 12-25 September 2018, is open for applications (deadline 1 April 2018). AEPSHEP is held every second year, hosted in countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The first three Schools in the […]

A week-long international School on Low Energy Antimatter Physics will be held at CERN between the 25th and the 29th of June 2018. It will cover the challenges in antimatter facility design and optimization, beyond state of the art beam diagnostics and advanced detectors, as well as novel antimatter experiments. In addition to lectures by research […]